Sunday, March 2, 2008

Quiet Sunday

Just another average day of work for me today while many enjoyed the down time of a lazy Sunday at South Pole. I did get to do all the checks for a different project so that the other tech could take it a little easier after having to get up at 3:30 a.m. to do some work for a different experiment out in the Dark Sector. It was a nice little challenge to follow the manual and work out what I needed to do. I'd been trained to do the most minimum of checks at the beginning of the summer when I was working as both the Cusp and Aurora Techs, but we never had time to get into this detail. Other than that, today was fairly unremarkable as far as work went.

It was pretty interesting how getting temperatures back up into the -50s F felt significantly warmer than in the mid -60s F. Relativity can be interesting that way, but we'll be getting the more painful side of the coin with temps down at what our wind chills have been all too soon, and for months and months on end.

The regular Sunday horror movie was a real stinker tonight. "The Haunting" was a terrible remake of a good movie from a great book ("The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson). Thankfully I slept through most of it. The movie had Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) special effects in the same year that they did "Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace" and "The Mummy", both of which were bigger ticket movies with loads of CGI. "The Haunting", in my opinion, relied way too much on special effects that weren't of the highest of caliber, due to these other obligations ILM had. Why go so heavy handed on the CGI in the first place? The original didn't need all that to still be a much creepier piece of cinema. I guess understatement and subtlety are endangered species when it comes to weaving most mainstream tales on the silver screen these days, particularly in the horror genre.